Tuesday, February 02, 2010

The Story Behind RealD 3D Technology

A rather nice "historical" account of RealD's emergence in the movie industry. Certainly, if you've seen any 3D movies within the past few years, and certainly if you've seen "Avatar", you would have experienced the more pleasant way of viewing 3D movies than those nasty bi-colored glasses.

The history of RealD's Boulder brain trust stretches back to work at the University of Colorado in the 1980s.

In 1987, CU received a federal award to establish the Center for Optoelectronics Computing Systems, which initially had strong focuses in physics and liquid crystal technologies, said Kate Tallman, director of technology transfer for CU-Boulder.

The center spawned a number of inventions related to color display technology and color projection technology and would be the incubator for a spin-off launched by two of its CU scientists.

I think that it is extremely important to make sure the public realizes where the seed money came from and from what initial research effort. Too often, what we get today is never connected to the original work that spawned off so many direct applications, so much so that the public doesn't see their tax dollars at work when it was invested into science and technology.